The important questions: Is Netflix killing our curiosity?

One evening not so long ago, tired after a day’s work and wanting nothing more than to slump into the temporary oblivion of my uncomfortable sofa, I turned on the television, navigated to Netflix and hit play on the first item on the splash page: a banner marquee for Daredevil, a Netflix Original Series about a blind New York attorney turned super-heroic crime fighter.

The strange thing was, I had no interest in watching Daredevil. The premise did not appeal to me at all. I found it monotonous and boring, its drama predictable, its characters nondescript. I felt no particular desire to see how its story developed. I was not what you would call hooked, nor even really compelled. Yet, I somehow watched this whole show straight through.

This was hardly the first time I had squandered a precious expanse of free time on something I afterward deemed not worth the investment. But something about this wasted night struck me as unique. It had something to do with choice and something to do with ease.

We glide through the algorithms like channel-surfing, and revert again to the state of passive TV-watchers, fine with whatever comes on.

Why did I endure Daredevil? Because Daredevil happened at that moment to be presented to me, and demanded no effort at all to either start or continue to the end. In my after-work exhaustion I felt incredibly unmotivated — felt indifferent to everything and disinclined to think much about what I wanted to consume. Netflix was eager to decide on my behalf. Algorithms too elaborate for me to understand determined I may be willing to watch content the company had furnished the platform for exactly this purpose. The algorithm probably knew I’d think Daredevil was bad. It probably knew I’d watch it anyway.

For a while, it seemed the generation of cord-cutters had liberated themselves from passive consumption. The life-long habit of my parents to sit in front of the TV and uncomplainingly receive the endless deluge of facile mediocrity that networks broadcast — canned-laughter sitcoms, mid-day soap operas, evening news hours, primetime dramas, movies of the week — was broken for my peers and me by the control afforded us by the internet and its infinite opportunities for self-directed entertainment. We no longer had to settle for what was merely on; we could choose to watch or read or listen to anything we wanted: a weekend of The Sopranos instead of a dinner-hour The Big Bang Theory re-run. It was more work than having cable, which made decisions for you and was on with something ready to go at the click of a button. But the work almost always paid off.

It’s amazing to consider the degree to which those avenues of online discovery have seemed to close off in recent years. Netflix and other platforms like it are the major culprits. On the one hand, these mega-corporate streaming services have steadily reduced their back catalogues, pruning their libraries of films and television series that date back any older than around 1993. Netflix once offered a sizeable, if not comprehensive, selection of classical Hollywood cinema and film from other eras and countries, but in Canada (especially) no longer does. (Worse, competitors that specialize in these supposedly niche titles continue to shutter, as FilmStruck announced it would just last week.) On the other hand, Netflix has an enormous, ever-growing library of brand new content it produces in-house — already an inexhaustible trove of proprietary Originals it wants to shove into our faces and encourage us to choose by reflex from the jump.

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.Netflix

The combined effect of this shrinking catalogue of serious cinema and growing catalogue of Netflix-branded filler is that choice has been replaced with passivity. An audience frequently inclined to take the path of least resistance — life is hard enough without having to spend a lot of time researching film and television — will only be too happy to accept whatever Netflix offers on a nightly basis. We are all of us inherently lazy, and have to fight hard to remain interested and active viewers; remaining informed and conscious consumers takes real effort. Netflix exploits that laziness, indeed cultivates it, by providing precisely the excuse we are craving to abandon our control. We glide through the algorithms like channel-surfing, and revert again to the state of passive TV-watchers, fine with whatever comes on. We don’t even need to hit play anymore; what’s up next will start in five, four, three …

This tends to produce a kind of Netflix-sponsored monoculture. When everyone you know suddenly seems to be talking about The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, a new remake of the old network comedy of teenage witchery, it’s difficult not to be skeptical. Are all of us watching this because it’s an interesting program of artistic merit that’s worth our time and attention? Or is it just because we turned on the TV and opened Netflix and it was right there at the top, ready to watch at a moment’s notice in its entirety? The ratio of people I know who have watched Sabrina to the people who enjoyed it is staggering.

It would be bad enough if we were all merely watching the same thing. As it stands we’re all watching the same thing, and most of us don’t even like it.

This is a different sort of complaint than that a lot of people like a dumb TV show: it’s not a problem of lowered standards. We still have standards, only now we seem more willing to waste our time on things that don’t meet them.

Are the algorithms the cause, or the symptom? Because make no mistake, this crisis of passivity is not restricted to Netflix and bad television. We are indulging in the same mindless consumption when we boot up Spotify and click through to the first available Daily Mix or prefabricated playlist rather than taking the time to sift through our libraries of saved albums or explore music we’ve never heard but are interested in. The trouble is this passive attitude deadens an impulse that ought to be essential to how we live. It kills our curiosity — our drive to discover and learn more about the art we consume, to stumble upon a great book or seek out an unfamiliar record or unearth an obscure old movie.

It’s that impulse that makes contact with art an occasion to grow and change. And it’s an impulse not only incompatible with algorithms, but snuffed out by the habits they instill.